Only The Paranoid Survive — A Particle’s Perspective

A story of resilience

Andy Grove’s book, Only the Paranoid Survive, talks of how upcoming businesses and companies disrupt the preexisting titanic-like ones.

He gives the example of how Microsoft changed the game for International Business Machines (IBM).

It’s a concept he runs with throughout the book — preparation is essential to avoid being thrown out of the ring. Out of the race. Out of the fight.

The concept is simple — don’t underestimate your opponent.

There’s a version I want to discuss concerning particles. The race particles run is that of avoiding annihilation. It is somewhat similar to that of companies, so similarities are a good starting point.

Similarities between companies and particles

Companies compete.

The market can have a monopoly but as Andy Grove reiterates, one should always be on their guard in case someone flips the rug.

Thus, despite companies competing, the aim of controlling the market is to stay in the game for long. It’s not even to be the leading provider or supplier of a good or service. Such statements are often used to convince customers that they should stick with the company. If they stick with the company, that company continues playing the game.

An infinite game.

Employers create rules to ensure employees’ responsibilities align with those of the company. If a wayward one finds their way inside, they will be identified and dismissed.

Anything to stay in the game.

By staying in the game, companies avoid annihilation. All companies aim to avoid annihilation. They will comply with the government rules, they will play the PR game and they will strive to stay ahead of the competition.

Anything to stay in the game.

It’s no different for a particle. It too wants to avoid annihilation.

You might wonder why a particle has such properties. The simple answer is it takes energy for you to break a particle.

Let’s say you have a hammer. The swing force in you is around 20 Newtons. You cannot exceed that. But for you to break the particle, you’d need 400 Newtons.

We can also assume that after every swing, the particle gets weaker by the same measure of 20 Newtons. If you’re to swing at it twenty times, you’d eventually break the particle.

The 20th swing is the defining swing. Nineteen swings were unsuccessful. After 19 futile attempts, only one succeeded in breaking the particle. The space of possibilities in breaking the particle shows that the particle will tend to avoid annihilation 19 out of 20 times.

They may not display it as actively as other organisms, but particles also tend to avoid annihilation.

Companies will strive to be a step ahead of their competitors’ hammers. Particles will strive to keep themselves intact despite your hammer. These two entities strive to avoid annihilation.

They have properties which we see in organisms.

Similarities between particles and organisms

I define an organism as an entity with a physical presence and a tendency to avoid annihilation.

The definition is very specific. Physical presence, not abstract existence. Thoughts are abstract. My pen and laptop are not. They are physical.

Physical existence by extension grants the entity a tendency to avoid annihilation. The example I have given above, of the particle and the hammer swings, is an example of how particles tend to avoid annihilation.

It’s no different for organisms.

You’d rather stay inside the house if there’s a storm. Nobody in their sane mind would want to go out and ‘enjoy’ the ‘breeze’ of the storm. Why? We want to avoid annihilation by preserving ourselves.

Even suicide is met with a lot of resistance. Before one commits suicide, they have attempted it several times. And if they get to the point of doing it, the body still struggles to keep itself alive.

Organisms strive to avoid annihilation. It is the single, all-inclusive goal of all organisms. It also applies to particles. For that reason, I consider particles to be organisms.

Not living organisms. Just organisms.

Life is difficult to describe and define. How does it emerge from non-living particles? It’s like saying you can raise the dead. So I don’t define what life is. I define what an organism is.

But if you’re reluctant to consider particles to be organisms, the definition still holds. It accounts for living organisms as well. They too strive to avoid annihilation.

It’s a struggle because the universe is bent on killing organisms. Thus, paranoid organisms will struggle to avoid death. The paranoid will survive.

Only the paranoid particles survive

The other property I use to describe particles is probability.

Death awaits all of us. Somewhere in the future, we will die with a probability of 1. But until that time comes, it will always be less than 1. Fractions such as ¼ and ½ are less than one. They can be used to describe organisms.

If your probability of dying is ½, then your probability of not dying is ½. That is 1–1/2 which equals ½.

To avoid annihilation, particles merge.

All the bonds you were taught are examples of mergers. Ionic bonds, covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, van Der Waals forces. They are all mergers.

Most of what chemistry does is explain the properties of these bonds. It does not explain why they form nor why they are so diverse. The theory of Organismal Selection does. It explains the need for mergers using probability.

If a particle’s probability of dying is ½ and another’s is ¼, when they merge, they form another particle, composed of the two, plus the bond they have made. Using the rules of probability, ½ and ¼ will result in a new particle with the probability of dying of 1/8.

For you to annihilate this particle, you’ll have to annihilate the bond, and then the two composite particles. In the absence of the bond, the probability of death is greater for each.

For one it’s ½ and ¼ for the other. These are greater than 1/8. But after the merger, the probability of death reduces significantly.

The result is the tendency to avoid death increases. 1–1/8 = 7/8.

Compare it with 1–1/2= ½; and 1–1/4 = ¾. These are smaller than 7/8.

Particles, thus, have to seek mergers to avoid annihilation.

No particle lacks this ‘paranoid’ stance. Every single particle seeks mergers. Only those paranoid enough to find them are the ones that survive.

Here’s an example of the smallest particles we know in their paranoid state

For most of these known forces of nature, the further you separate them, the weaker the particles become.

For gravity, it can approximate the square distance between two masses. Thus, the further you separate them, the less force is needed to further the separation.

Think of magnets. The closer they are, the easier it is to attract. The harder it is to separate them. But as you increase the distance between them, the separation becomes easier. However, for quarks, it’s the opposite.

Quarks have a strange form of paranoia. The further you separate them, the greater the force needed to further the separation.

If we’re to assume that quarks are among the first particles to form in our shared universe, we can conclude that they formed a unique form of merger following the annihilative properties of the early universe.

The universe, at the beginning, expanded really fast. A faster-than-light expansion, known as inflation, is said to have taken part in the early universe. If entities had formed back then, it would have been difficult to keep intact with simple bonds.

What would keep an organism intact was a bond such as the one we see in quarks. The further you separate them, the more energy you’d need to further separate them. This state of paranoia of the quarks could explain why they have survived for billions of years.

Only the paranoid survive.

As I close…

Organismal Selection is a wild theory.

It takes particles and humans and lumps them into one. Using probability, I make the case that it’s possible to lump these disparate entities.

And just like companies, they struggle to avoid death. Death for a company is complete annihilation for a particle.

They have to avoid it.

If there’s a lesson we can get from quarks it’s that paranoia helps.

Particles are survivors.

The paranoid survive.

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